Understanding Search Engines. Mathematical Modeling and Text Retrieval

Understanding Search Engines

SOFTWARE • ENVIRONMENTS • TOOLS The series includes handbooks and software guides as well as monographs on practical implementation of computational methods, environments, and tools. The focus is on making recent developments available in a practical format to researchers and other users of these methods and tools.

Editor-in-Chief Jack J. Dongarra University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Editorial Board James W. Demmel, University of California, Berkeley Dennis Gannon, Indiana University Eric Grosse, AT&T Bell Laboratories Ken Kennedy, Rice University Jorge J. More, Argonne National Laboratory

Software, Environments, and Tools Michael W. Berry and Murray Browne, Understanding Search Engines: Mathematical Modeling and Text Retrieval, Second Edition Craig C. Douglas, Gundolf Haase, and Ulrich Langer, A Tutorial on Elliptic PDE Solvers and Their Parallelization Louis Komzsik, The Lanczos Method: Evolution and Application Bard Ermentrout, Simulating, Analyzing, and Animating Dynamical Systems: A Guide to XPPAUT for Researchers and Students V. A. Barker, L. 5. Blackford, J. Dongarra,). Du Croz, S. Hammarling, M. Marinova, J. Wasniewski, and P. Yalamov, LAPACK95 Users' Guide Stefan Goedecker and Adolfy Hoisie, Performance Optimization of Numerically Intensive Codes Zhaojun Bai, James Demmel, Jack Dongarra, Axel Ruhe, and Henk van der Vorst, Templates for the Solution of Algebraic Eigenvalue Problems: A Practical Guide Lloyd N. Trefethen, Spectral Methods in MATLAB E. Anderson, Z. Bai, C. Bischof, S. Blackford, J. Demmel, J. Dongarra, J. Du Croz, A. Greenbaum, S. Hammarling, A. McKenney, and D. Sorensen, LAPACK Users' Guide, Third Edition Michael W. Berry and Murray Browne, Understanding Search Engines: Mathematical Modeling and Text Retrieval Jack J. Dongarra, lain S. Duff, Danny C. Sorensen, and Henk A. van der Vorst, Numerical Linear Algebra for High-Performance Computers R. B. Lehoucq, D. C. Sorensen, and C. Yang, ARPACK Users' Guide: Solution of Large-Scale Eigenvalue Problems with Implicitly Restarted Arnoldi Methods Randolph E. Bank, PLTMG: A Software Package for Solving Elliptic Partial Differential Equations, Users' Guide 8.0 L. S. Blackford, J, Choi, A. Cleary, E. D'Azevedo, J. Demmel, I. Dhillon, J. Dongarra, S. Hammarling, G. Henry, A. Petitet, K. Stanley, D. Walker, and R, C, Whaley, ScaLAPACK Users' Guide Greg Astfalk, editor, Applications on Advanced Architecture Computers

Francoise Chaitm-Chatelin and Valerie Fraysse, Lectures on Finite Precision Computations Roger W. Hockney, The Science of Computer Benchmarking Richard Barrett, Michael Berry, Tony F. Chan, James Demmel, June Donato, Jack Dongarra, Victor Eijkhout, Roldan Pozo, Charles Romine, and Henk van der Vorst, Templates for the Solution of Linear Systems: Building Blocks for Iterative Methods E. Anderson, Z. Bai, C. Bischof, J. Demmel, J. Dongarra, J. Du Croz, A. Greenbaum, S. Hammarling, A. McKenney, S. Ostrouchov, and D. Sorensen, LAPACK Users' Guide, Second Edition Jack J. Dongarra, lain S. Duff, Danny C. Sorensen, and Henk van der Vorst, Solving Linear Systems on Vector and Shared Memory Computers

J. J. Dongarra, J. R. Bunch, C. B. Moler, and C, W, Stewart,linpackUsers'Guide

Understanding Search Engines Mathematical Modeling and Text Retrieval Second Edition

Michael W. Berry University of Tennessee Knoxville, Tennessee

Murray Browne University of Tennessee Knoxville, Tennessee

Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Philadelphia

Copyright © 2005 by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. 10987654321 All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any manner without the written permission of the publisher. For information, write to the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, 3600 University City Science Center, Philadelphia, PA 19104-2688. Trademarked names may be used in this book without the inclusion of a trademark symbol. These names are used in an editorial context only; no infringement is intended. The illustration on the front cover was originally sketched by Katie Terpstra and later redesigned on a color workstation by Eric Clarkson and David Rogers. The concept for the design came from an afternoon in which the co-authors deliberated on the meaning of "search." Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Berry, Michael W. Understanding search engines : mathematical modeling and text retrieval / Michael W. Berry, Murray Browne.—2nd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-89871-581-4 (pbk.) 1. Web search engines. 2. Vector spaces. 3. Text processing (Computer science) I, BrovYne, Murray. II. Title. TK5105.884.B47 2005 025.04-dc22

2005042539

is a registered trademark.

To our families (Teresa, Amanda, Rebecca, Cynthia, and Bonnie)

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Contents Preface to the Second Edition

xi

Preface to the First Edition

xv

1 Introduction

1

1.1 Document File Preparation 1.1.1 Manual Indexing 1.1.2 File Cleanup 1.2 Information Extraction 1.3 Vector Space Modeling 1.4 Matrix Decompositions 1.5 Query Representations 1.6 Ranking and Relevance Feedback 1.7 Searching by Link Structure 1.8 User Interface 1.9 Book Format 2 Document File Preparation

2 2 3 4 4 6 7 8 9 9 10 11

2.1 Document Purification and Analysis 2.1.1 Text Formatting 2.1.2 Validation 2.2 Manual Indexing 2.3 Automatic Indexing 2.4 Item Normalization 2.5 Inverted File Structures 2.5.1 Document File 2.5.2 Dictionary List 2.5.3 Inversion List VII

12 13 14 14 16 19 21 22 23 24

viii

Contents 2.5.4

Other File Structures

26

3 Vector Space Models 3.1 Construction 3.1.1 Term-by-Document Matrices 3.1.2 Simple Query Matching 3.2 Design Issues 3.2.1 Term Weighting 3.2.2 Sparse Matrix Storage 3.2.3 Low-Rank Approximations

29 29 30 32 34 34 38 40

4 Matrix Decompositions 4.1 QR Factorization 4.2 Singular Value Decomposition 4.2.1 Low-Rank Approximations 4.2.2 Query Matching 4.2.3 Software 4.3 Semidiscrete Decomposition 4.4 Updating Techniques

45 45 51 55 55 57 58 59

5 Query Management 5.1 Query Binding 5.2 Types of Queries 5.2.1 Boolean Queries 5.2.2 Natural Language Queries 5.2.3 Thesaurus Queries 5.2.4 Fuzzy Queries 5.2.5 Term Searches 5.2.6 Probabilistic Queries

63 63 65 65 66 66 67 67 68

6 Ranking and Relevance Feedback 6.1 Performance Evaluation 6.1.1 Precision 6.1.2 Recall 6.1.3 Average Precision 6.1.4 Genetic Algorithms 6.2 Relevance Feedback

71 72 73 73 74 75 75

Contents

ix

7 Searching by Link Structure 7.1 HITS Method 7.1.1 HITS Implementation 7.1.2 HITS Summary 7.2 PageRank Method 7.2.1 PageRank Adjustments 7.2.2 PageRank Implementation 7.2.3 PageRank Summary

77 79 81 82 84 85 87 88

8 User Interface Considerations 8.1 General Guidelines 8.2 Search Engine Interfaces 8.2.1 Form Fill-in 8.2.2 Display Considerations 8.2.3 Progress Indication 8.2.4 No Penalties for Error 8.2.5 Results 8.2.6 Test and Retest 8.2.7 Final Considerations

89 89 90 91 92 92 93 93 94 95

9 Further Reading 9.1 General Textbooks on IR 9.2 Computational Methods and Software 9.3 Search Engines 9.4 User Interfaces

97 97 98 100 100

Bibliography

103

Index

113

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Preface to the Second Edition Anyone who has used a web search engine with any regularity knows that there is an element of the unknown with every query. Sometimes the user will type in a stream-of-consciousness query, and the documents retrieved are a perfect match, while the next query can be seemingly succinct and focused, only to earn the bane of all search results — the no documents found response. Oftentimes the same queries can be submitted on different databases with just the opposite results. It is an experience aggravating enough to swear off doing web searches as well as swear at the developers of such systems. However, because of the transparent nature of computer software design, there is a tendency to forget the decisions and trade-offs that are constantly made throughout the design process affecting the performance of the system. One of the main objectives of this book is to identify to the novice search engine builder, such as the senior level computer science or applied mathematics student or the information sciences graduate student specializing in retrieval systems, the impact of certain decisions that are made at various junctures of this development. One of the major decisions in developing information retrieval systems is selecting and implementing the computational approaches within an integrated software environment. Applied mathematics plays a major role in search engine performance, and Understanding Search Engines (or USE) focuses on this area, bridging the gap between the fields of applied mathematics and information management, disciplines which previously have operated largely in independent domains. But USE does not only fill the gap between applied mathematics and information management, it also fills a niche in the information retrieval literature. The work of William Frakes and Ricardo Baeza-Yates (eds.), Information Retrieval Data Structures and Algorithms, a 1992 collection of journal articles on various related topics, Gerald Kowalski's (1997) Information Retrieval Systems: Theory and Implementation, a broad overview XI

xii

Preface to the Second Edition

of information retrieval systems, and Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Berthier Ribeiro-Neto's (1999) Modern Information Retrieval, a computer-science perspective of information retrieval, are all fine textbooks on the topic, but understandably they lack the gritty details of the mathematical computations needed to build more successful search engines. With this in mind, USE does not provide an overview of information retrieval systems but prefers to assume the supplementary role to the abovementioned books. Many of the ideas for USE were first presented and developed as part of a Data and Information Management course at the University of Tennessee's Computer Science Department, a course which won the 1997 Undergraduate Computational Engineering and Science Award sponsored by the United States Department of Energy and the Krell Institute. The course, which required student teams to build their own search engines, has provided invaluable background material in the development of USE. As mentioned earlier, USE concentrates on the applied mathematics portion of search engines. Although not transparent to the pedestrian search engine user, mathematics plays an integral part in information retrieval systems by computing the emphasis the query terms have in their relationship to the database. This is especially true in vector space modeling, which is one of the predominant techniques used in search engine design. With vector space modeling, traditional orthogonal matrix decompositions from linear algebra can be used to encode both terms and documents in K-dimensional space. There are other computational methods that are equally useful or valid. In fact, in this edition we have included a chapter on link-structure algorithms (an approach used by the Google search engine) which arise from both graph theory and linear algebra. However, in order to teach future developers the intricate details of a system, a single approach had to be selected. Therefore the reader can expect a fair amount of math, including explanations of algorithms and data structures and how they operate in information retrieval systems. This book will not hide the math (concentrated in Chapters 3, 4, and 7), nor will it allow itself to get bogged down in it either. A person with a nonmathematical background (such as an information scientist) can still appreciate some of the mathematical intricacies involved with building search engines without reading the more technical Chapters 3, 4, and 7. To maintain its focus on the mathematical approach, USE has purposely avoided digressions into Java programming, HTML programming, and how

Preface to the Second Edition

xiii

to create a web interface. An informal conversational approach has been adopted to give the book a less intimidating tone, which is especially important considering the possible multidisciplinary backgrounds of its potential readers; however, standard math notation will be used. Boxed items throughout the book contain ancillary information, such as mathematical examples, anecdotes, and current practices, to help guide the discussion. Websites providing software (e.g., CGI scripts, text parsers, numerical software) and text corpora are provided in Chapter 9.

Acknowledgments In addition to those who assisted with the first edition, the authors would like to gratefully acknowledge the support and encouragement of SIAM, who along with our readers encouraged us to update the original book. We appreciate the helpful comments and suggestions from Alan Wallace and Gayle Baker at Hodges Library, University of Tennessee, Scott Wells from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Tennessee, Mark Gauthier at H.W. Wilson Company, June Levy at Cinhahl Information Systems, and James Marcetich at the National Library of Medicine. Special thanks go to Amy Langville of the Department of Mathematics at North Carolina State University, who reviewed our new chapter on link structurebased algorithms. The authors would also like to thank graphic designer David Rogers, who updated the fine artwork of Katie Terpstra, who drew the original art. Hopefully, USE will help future developers, whether they be students or software engineers, to lessen the aggravation encountered with the current state of search engines. It continues to be a dynamic time for search engines and the future of the Web itself, as both ultimately depend on how easily users can find the information they are looking for.

MICHAEL W. BERRY MURRAY BROWNE

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Preface to the First Edition Anyone who has used a web search engine with any regularity knows that there is an element of the unknown with every query. Sometimes the user will type in a stream-of-consciousness query, and the documents retrieved are a perfect match, while the next query can be seemingly succinct and focused, only to earn the bane of all search results — the no documents found response. Oftentimes the same queries can be submitted on different databases with just the opposite results. It is an experience aggravating enough to make one swear off doing web searches as well as swear at the developers of such systems. However, because of the transparent nature of computer software design, there is a tendency to forget the decisions and trade-offs that are constantly made throughout the design process affecting the performance of the system. One of the main objectives of this book is to identify to the novice search engine builder, such as the senior level computer science or applied mathematics student or the information sciences graduate student specializing in retrieval systems, the impact of certain decisions that are made at various junctures of this development. One of the major decisions in developing information retrieval systems is selecting and implementing the computational approaches within an integrated software environment. Applied mathematics plays a major role in search engine performance, and Understanding Search Engines (or USE] focuses on this area, bridging the gap between the fields of applied mathematics and information management, disciplines that previously have operated largely in independent domains. But USE does not only fill the gap between applied mathematics and information management, it also fills a niche in the information retrieval literature. The work of William Frakes and Ricardo Baeza-Yates (eds.), Information Retrieval: Data Structures & Algorithms, a 1992 collection of journal articles on various related topics, and Gerald Kowalski's (1997) Information Retrieval Systems: Theory and Implementation, a broad overview xv

xvi

Preface to the First Edition

of information retrieval systems, are fine textbooks on the topic, but both understandably lack the gritty details of the mathematical computations needed to build more successful search engines. With this in mind, USE does not provide an overview of information retrieval systems but prefers to assume a supplementary role to the aforementioned books. Many of the ideas for USE were first presented and developed as part of a Data and Information Management course at the University of Tennessee's Computer Science Department, a course which won the 1997 Undergraduate Computational Engineering and Science Award sponsored by the United States Department of Energy and the Krell Institute. The course, which required student teams to build their own search engines, has provided invaluable background material in the development of USE. As mentioned earlier, USE concentrates on the applied mathematics portion of search engines. Although not transparent to the pedestrian search engine user, mathematics plays an integral part in information retrieval systems by computing the emphasis the query terms have in their relationship to the database. This is especially true in vector space modeling, which is one of the predominant techniques used in search engine design. With vector space modeling, traditional orthogonal matrix decompositions from linear algebra can be used to encode both terms and documents in K-dimensional space. However, that is not to say that other computational methods are not useful or valid, but in order to teach future developers the intricate details of a system, a single approach had to be selected. Therefore, the reader can expect a fair amount of math, including explanations of algorithms and data structures and how they operate in information retrieval systems. This book will not hide the math (concentrated in Chapters 3 and 4), nor will it allow itself to get bogged down in it either. A person with a nonmathematical background (such as an information scientist) can still appreciate some of the mathematical intricacies involved with building search engines without reading the more technical Chapters 3 and 4. To maintain its focus on the mathematical approach, USE has purposely avoided digressions into Java programming, HTML programming, and how to create a web interface. An informal conversational approach has been adopted to give the book a less intimidating tone, which is especially important considering the possible multidisciplinary backgrounds of its potential readers; however, standard math notation will be used. Boxed items throughout the book contain ancillary information, such as mathematical

Preface to the First Edition

xvii

examples, anecdotes, and current practices, to help guide the discussion. Websites providing software (e.g., CGI scripts, text parsers, numerical software) and text corpora are provided in Chapter 9.

Acknowledgments The authors would like to gratefully acknowledge the support and encouragement of SIAM, the United States Department of Energy, the Krell Institute, the National Science Foundation for supporting related research, the University of Tennessee, the students of CS460/594 (fall semester 1997), and graduate assistant Luojian Chen. Special thanks go to Alan Wallace and David Penniman from the School of Information Sciences at the University of Tennessee, Padma Raghavan and Ethel Wittenberg in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Tennessee, Barbara Chen at H.W. Wilson Company, and Martha Ferrer at Elsevier Science SPD for their helpful proofreading, comments, and/or suggestions. The authors would also like to thank Katie Terpstra and Eric Clarkson for their work with the book cover artwork and design, respectively. Hopefully, this book will help future developers, whether they be students or software engineers, to lessen the aggravation encountered with the current state of search engines. It is a critical time for search engines and the future of the Web itself, as both ultimately depend on how easily users can find the information they are looking for.

MICHAEL W. BERRY MURRAY BROWNE

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DOONESBURY ©G.B. Trudeau. Reprinted with permission of UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

Introduction We expect a lot from our search engines. We ask them vague questions about topics that we are unfamiliar about ourselves and in turn anticipate a concise, organized response. We type in principal when we meant principle. We incorrectly type the name Lanzcos and fully expect the search engine to know that we really meant Lanczos. Basically we are asking the computer to supply the information we want, instead of the information we asked for. In short, users are asking the computer to reason intuitively. It is a tall order, and in some search systems you would probably have better success if you laid your head on the keyboard and coaxed the computer to try to read your mind. Of course these problems are nothing new to the reference librarian who works the desk at a college or public library. An experienced reference librarian knows that a few moments spent with the patron, listening, asking questions, and listening some more, can go a long way in efficiently directing the user to the source that will fulfill the user's information needs. In the computerized world of searchable databases this same strategy is being developed, but it has a long way to go before being perfected. There is another problem with locating the relevant documents for a respective query, and that is the increasing size of collections. Heretofore, the focus of new technology has been more on processing and digitizing information, whether it be text, images, video, or audio, than on organizing it. 1

2

Chapter 1. Introduction

It has created a situation information designer Richard Saul Wurman [87] refers to as a tsunami of data: "This is a tidal wave of unrelated, growing data formed in bits and bytes, coming in an unorganized, uncontrolled, incoherent cacophony of foam. It's filled with flotsam and jetsam. It's filled with the sticks and bones and shells of inanimate and animate life. None of it is easily related, none of it comes with any organizational methodology." To combat this tsunami of data, search engine designers have developed a set of mathematically based tools that will improve search engine performance. Such tools are invaluable for improving the way in which terms and documents are automatically synthesized. Term-weight ing methods, for example, are used to place different emphases on a term's (or keyword's) relationship to the other terms and other documents in the collection. One of the most effective mathematical tools embraced in automated indexing is the vector space model [73]. In the vector space information retrieval (IR) model, a unique vector is defined for every term in every document. Another unique vector is computed for the user's query. With the queries being easily represented in the vector space model, searching translates to the computation of distances between query and document vectors. However, before vectors can be created in the document, some preliminary document preparation must be done.

1.1

Document File Preparation

Librarians are well aware of the necessities of organizing and extracting information. Through decades (or centuries) of experience, librarians have refined a system of organizing materials that come into the library. Every item is catalogued, based on some individual's or group's assessment of what that book is about, followed by appropriate entries in the library's on-line or card catalog. Although it is often outsourced, essentially each book in the library has been individually indexed or reviewed to determine its contents. This approach is generally referred to as manual indexing, 1.1.1

Manual Indexing

As with most approaches, there are are some real advantages and disadvantages to manual indexing. One major advantage is that a human indexer can

1.1. Document File Preparation

3

establish relationships and concepts between seemingly different topics that can be very useful to future readers. Unfortunately, this task is expensive, time consuming, and can be at the mercy of the background and personality of the indexer. For example, studies by Cleverdon [24] reported that if two groups of people construct thesauri in a particular subject area, the overlap of index terms was only 60%. Furthermore, if two indexers used the same thesaurus on the same document, common index terms were shared in only 30% of the cases. Also of potential concern is that the manually indexed system may not be reproducible or if the original system was destroyed or modified it would be difficult to recreate. All in all, it is a system that has worked very well, but with the continued proliferation of digitized information on the World Wide Web (WWW), there is a need for a more automated system. Fortunately, because of increased computer processing power in this decade, computers have been used to extract and index words from documents in a more automated fashion. This has also changed the role of manual subject indexing. According to Kowalski [45], "The primary use of manual subject indexing now shifts to the abstraction of concepts and judgments on the value of the information." Of course, the next stage in the evolution of automatic indexing is being able to link related concepts even when the query does not specifically make such a request.

1.1.2

File Cleanup

One of the least glamorous and often overlooked parts of search engine design is the preparation of the documents that are going to be searched. A simple analogy might be the personal filing system you may have in place at home. Everything from receipts to birth certificates to baby pictures are thrown into a filing cabinet or a series of boxes. It is all there, but without file folders, plastic tabs, color coding, or alphabetizing, it is nothing more than a heap of paper. Subsequently, when you go to search for the credit card bill you thought you paid last month, it is an exercise similar to rummaging through a wastebasket. There is little difference between the previously described home filing system and documents in a web-based collection, especially if nothing has been done to standardize those documents to make them searchable. In other words, unless documents are cleaned up or purified by performing pedestrian tasks such as making sure every document has a title, marking

4

Chapter 1.

Introduction

where each document begins and ends, and handling parts of the documents that are not text (such as images), then most search engines will respond by returning the wrong document(s) or fragments of documents. One misconception is that information that has been formatted through an hypertext markup language (HTML) editor and displayed in a browser is sufficiently formatted, but that is not always the case because HTML was designed as a platform-independent language. In general, web browsers are very forgiving with built-in error recovery and thus will display almost any kind of text, whether it looks good or not. However, search engines have more stringent format requirements, and that is why when building a webbased document collection for a search engine, each HTML document has to be validated into a more specific format prior to any indexing.

1.2

Information Extraction

In Chapter 2, we will go into more detail on how to go about doing this cleanup, which is just the first of many procedures needed for what is referred to as item normalization. We also look at how the words of a document are processed into searchable tokens by addressing such areas as processing tokens and stemming. Once these prerequisites are met, the documents are ready to be indexed.

1.3

Vector Space Modeling

SMART (system for the mechanical analysis and retrieval of text), developed by Gerald Salton and his colleagues at Cornell University [73], was one of the first examples of a vector space IR model. In such a model, both terms and/or documents are encoded as vectors in K-dimensional space. The choice k can be based on the number of unique terms, concepts, or perhaps classes associated with the text collection. Hence, each vector component (or dimension) is used to reflect the importance of the corresponding term/concept/class in representing the semantics or meaning of a document. Figure 1.1 demonstrates how a simple vector space model can be represented as a term-by-document matrix. Here, each column defines a document, while each row corresponds to a unique term or keyword in the collection. The values stored in each matrix element or cell defines the frequency that a term occurs in a document. For example, Term I appears once in

5

1.3. Vector Space Modeling

Term 1 Term 2 Term 3

Document 1 1 0 0

Document 2 0 0 1

Document 3 1 1 1

Document 4 0 1 0

Figure 1.1: Small term-by-document matrix. both Document 1 and Document 3 but not in the other two documents (see Figure 1.1). Figure 1.2 demonstrates how each column of the 3x4 matrix in Figure 1.1 can be represented as a vector in 3-dimensional space. Using a kdimensional space to represent documents for clustering and query matching purposes can become problematic if k is chosen to be the number of terms (rows of matrix in Figure 1.1). Chapter 3 will discuss methods for representing term-document associations in lower-dimensional vector spaces and how to construct term-by-documents using term-weighting methods [27, 71, 79] to show the importance a term can have within a document or across the entire collection.

Figure 1.2: Representation of documents in a 3-dimensional vector space.

6

Chapter 1. Introduction

Through the representation of queries as vectors in the K-dimensional space, documents (and terms) can be compared and ranked according to similarity with the query. Measures such as the Euclidean distance and cosine of the angle made between document and query vectors provide the similarity values for ranking. Approaches based on conditional probabilities (logistic regression, Bayesian models) to judge document-to-query similarities are not the scope of USE; however, references to other sources such as [31, 32] have been included.

1.4

Matrix Decompositions

In simplest terms, search engines take the user's query and find all the documents that are related to the query. However, this task becomes complicated quickly, especially when the user wants more than just a literal match. One approach known as latent semantic indexing (LSI) [8, 25] attempts to do more than just literal matching. Employing a vector space representation of both terms and documents, LSI can be used to find relevant documents which may not even share any search terms provided by the user. Modeling the underlying term-to-document association patterns or relationships is the key for conceptual-based indexing approaches such as LSI. The first step in modeling the relationships between the query and a document collection is just to keep track of which document contains which terms or which terms are found in which documents. This is a major task requiring computer-generated data structures (such as term-by-document matrices) to keep track of these relationships. Imagine a spreadsheet with every document of a database arranged in columns. Down the side of the chart is a list of all the possible terms (or words) that could be found in those documents. Inside the chart, rows of integers (or perhaps just ones and zeros) mark how many times the term appears in the document (or if it appears at all). One interesting characteristic of term-by-document matrices is that they usually contain a greater proportion of zeros; i.e., they are quite sparse. Since every document will contain only a small subset of words from the dictionary, this phenomenon is not too difficult to explain. On the average, only about 1% of all the possible- elements or colls are populated [8, 10, 43]. When a user enters a query, the retrieval system (search engine) will attempt to extract all matching documents. Recent advances in hardware

1.5. Query Representations

7

technologies have produced extremely fast computers, but these machines are not so fast that they can scan through an entire database every time the user makes a query. Fortunately, through the use of concepts from applied mathematics, statistics, and computer science, the actual amount of information that must be processed to retrieve useful information is continuing to decrease. But such reductions are not always easy to achieve, especially if one wants to obtain more than just a literal match. Efficiency in indexing via vector space modeling requires special encodings for terms and documents in a text collection. The encoding of term-by-document matrices for lower-dimensional vector spaces (where the dimension of the space is much smaller than the number of terms or documents) using either continuous or discrete matrix decompositions is required for LSI-based indexing. The singular value decomposition (SVD) [33] and semidiscrete decomposition (SDD) [43] are just two examples of the various matrix decompositions arising from numerical linear algebra that can be used in vector space IR models such as LSI. The matrix factors produced by these decompositions provide automatic ways of encoding or representing terms and documents as vectors in any dimension. The clustering of similar or related terms and documents is realized through probes into the derived vector space model, i.e., queries. A more detailed discussion of the use of matrix decompositions such as the SVD and SDD for IR models will be provided in Chapter 4.

1.5

Query Representations

Query matching within a vector space IR model can be very different from conventional item matching. Whereas the latter conjures up a image of a user typing in a few terms and the search engine matching the user's terms to those indexed from the documents in the collection, in vector space models such as LSI, the query can be interpreted as another (or new) document. Upon submitting the query, the search engine will retrieve the cluster of documents (and terms whose word usage patterns reflect that of the query). This difference is not necessarily transparent to the experienced searcher. Those trained in searching are often taught Boolean searching methods (especially in library and information sciences), i.e., the connection of search terms by AND and OR. For example, if a Boolean searcher queries a CDROM encyclopedia on German shepherds and bloodhounds, the documents

8

Chapter 1. Introduction

retrieved must have information about both German shepherds and bloodhounds. In a pure Boolean search, if the query was German shepherds or bloodhounds, the documents retrieved will include any article that has something about German shepherds or bloodhounds. IR models can differ in how individual search terms are processed. Typically, all terms are treated equally with insignificant words removed. How ever, some terms may be weighted according to their importance. Oddly enough, with vector space models, the user may be better off listing as many relevant terms as he or she can in the query, in contrast to a Boolean user who usually types in just a few words. In vector space models, the more terms that are listed, the better chance the search engine has in finding similar documents in the database. Natural language queries such as "I would like articles about German Shepherds and bloodhounds" comprise yet another form of query representation. Even though to the trained Boolean searcher this seems unnatural, this type of query can be easier and more accurate to process, because the importance of each word can be gauged from the semantic structure of the sentence. By discarding insignificant words (such as /, would, like) a conceptual-based IR system is able to determine which words are more important and therefore should be used to extract clusters of related documents and/or terms. In Chapter 5, we will further discuss the process of query binding, or how the search engine takes abstract formulations of queries and forms specific requests.

1.6

Ranking and Relevance Feedback

As odd as it may sound, search engine users really do not care how a search engine works they are just interested in getting the information they have requested. Once they have the answer they want, they log off — end of query. This disregarding attitude creates certain challenges for the search engine builder. For example, only the user can ultimately judge if the retrieved information meets his or her needs. In information retrieval, this is known as relevance, or judging how well the information received matches the query. (Augmenting this problem is that oftentimes the user is not sure what he or she is looking for.) Fortunately, vector space modeling, because of its applied mathematical underpinnings, has characteristics which improve the

1.7. Searching by Link Structure

9

chances that the user will eventually receive relevant documents to his or her corresponding query. The search engine does this in two ways: by ranking the retrieved documents according to how well they match the query and relevance feedback or asking the user to identify which documents best meet his or her information needs and then, based on that answer, resubmitting the query. Applied mathematics plays such an integral part of vector-based search engines, because there is already in place a quantifiable way to say, Document A ranks higher in meeting your criteria than Document B. This idea can then be taken one step further, when the user is asked, Do you want more documents like Document A or Document B or Document C...? After the user makes the selection, more similar documents are retrieved and ranked. Again, this process is known as relevance feedback. Using a more mathematical perspective, we will discuss in Chapter 6 the use of vector-based similarity measures (e.g., cosines) to rank-order documents (and terms) according to their similarity with a query.

1.7

Searching by Link Structure

As mentioned in the Preface, there are several different IR methods that can be used to build search engines. Although USE focuses on the mathematics of LSI, this method is limited to smaller document collections, and it is not readily scalable to handle a document collection the size of the Web. Methods that take into the account the hyperlink structure of the Web have already proven effective (and profitable). However, link structure-based algorithms are also dependent on linear algebra and graph theory. Chapter 7 looks at some of the math involved.

1.8

User Interface

If users are not particular about how search engines actually work, what really does matter to them? Is it just the search results? Not necessarily, as even the best possible search engine imaginable, guaranteed to produce great amounts of relevant documents for every query, would be underutilized if the user interface was extremely confusing. Conversely, how often have we returned to some ineffectual search engine time and time again just because it is easy to use? Probably more times than we are willing to admit.

10

Chapter 1. Introduction

These two extreme examples illustrate the importance of the user interface in search engine design. Usually on the Web, the user simply fills out a short form and then submits his or her query. But does the user know whether he or she is permitted to type in more than a few words, use Boolean operators, or if the query should be in the form of a question? Other factors related to the user interface is how the retrieved documents will be displayed. Will it be titles only, titles and abstracts, or clusters of like documents? Then there is the issue of speed. Should the user ever be expected to wait more than five seconds for results after pressing the search key? In the design of search engines, there are trade-offs which will affect the speed of the retrieval. Chapter 8 includes features to consider when planning a search engine interface.

1.9

Book Format

Before we begin going into depth about each of the interrelated ingredients that goes into building a search engine, we want to remind the reader why the book is formatted the way it is. We are anticipating the likelihood that interested readers will have different backgrounds and viewpoints about search engines. Therefore, we purposely tried to separate the nontechnical material from the mathematical calculations. Those with an information sciences or nonmathematical background should consider skimming or skipping Chapters 3 and 4 and Sections 7.1 and 7.2. However, we encourage those with applied mathematics or computer science backgrounds to read the less technical Chapters 1, 2, 5, and 8 because the exposure to the information science perspective of search engines is critical for both assessing performance and understanding how users see search engines. In Chapter 9, we list background sources (including current websites) that not only have been influential in writing this book but can provide opportunities for further understanding. Another point worth reminding readers about is that vector space modeling was chosen for conceptual IR to demonstrate the important role that applied mathematics can play in communicating new ideas and attracting multidiaciplinary research in the design of intelligent search engines. Certainly there are other IR approaches, but hopefully our experiences with the vector space model will help pave the way for future system designers to build better, more useful search engines.

Chapter 2

Document File Preparation As mentioned briefly in the introduction, a major part of search engine development is making decisions about how to prepare the documents that are to be searched. If the documents are automatically indexed, they will be managed much differently than if they were just manually indexed. The search engine designer must be aware that building the automatic index is as important as any other component of search engine development. As pointed out by Korfhage in [44], system designers must also take into consideration that it is not unusual for a user to be linked into many different databases through a single user interface. Each one of these databases will often have its own way of handling the data. Also, the user is unaware that he or she is searching different databases (nor does he or she care). It is up to the search engine builder to smooth over these differences and make them transparent to the user. Building an index requires two lengthy steps: 1. Document analysis and, for lack of a better word, purification. This requires analyzing how each document in each database (e.g., web documents) is organized in terms of what makes up a document (title, author or source, body) and how the information is presented. Is the critical information in the text, or is it presented in tables, charts, graphics, or images? Decisions must be made on what information or 11

12

Chapter 2. Document File Preparation parts of the document (referred to as zoning [45]) will be indexed and which information will not. 2. Token analysis or term extraction. On a word- by- word basis, a decision must be made on which words (or phrases) should be used as referents in order to best represent the semantic content (meaning) of documents.

2.1

Document Purification and Analysis

After even limited exposure to the Web, one quickly realizes that HTML documents are comprised of many attributes such as graphic images, photos, tables, charts, and audio clips — and those are just the visible characteristics. By viewing the source code of an HTML document, one also sees a variety of tags such as <TITLE>, , and <META>, which are used to describe how the document is organized and displayed. Obviously, hypertext documents are more than just text. Any search engine on the Web must address the heterogeneity of HTML documents. One of the changes in search engine development in the past few years is that instead of search engine developers adapting to the different types of webpages, webpage developers are adapting their webpages in order to woo the major commercial search engines. (See the sidebar on commercial search engines later in this chapter.) Since the publication of the first edition of USE, an entire cottage industry has emerged to specialize in what is known as search engine optimization (SEO), developing strategies to improve a site's position on the "results" page and translating that prominent position into more visits (clicks). Marketplace aside, search engines still must address the nonuniformity of processing HTML documents and make decisions on how to handle such nontextual elements as the following: • tags, which allow the page developer to leave hidden instructions or reminders about the page.

ALT TEXT1*, an attribute which allows the page developer to provido a text description of an image in case the user has the browser set to text only. Uniform resource locators (URLs), which are usually defined within tags.

2.1.

Document Purification and Analysis

13

• , an attribute that controls the layout and appearance of coordinated webpages. • <META> tags, which are not part of the content but instead are used to describe the content. <META> description tags and <META> keywords both provide the developer an opportunity to be more specific on what each webpage is about. In the past, some large web search engines deliberately avoided indexing some of the nontextual elements such as <META> tags to avoid problems/biases associated with the ranked returned list of documents. This was done to combat the web developers who would overload their <META> tags with keywords in hopes of skewing search results in their favor. This led to major search engines changing what they indexed and what they did not. And it is not unusual for these trends to change from time to time. For example, the major commerical search engines previously ignored and during their crawling tasks, but this is no longer the case. Also, conventional wisdom (from a developer's standpoint, at least) still recommends that web authors pay attention to assigning values to the <META> keyword and description fields [69, 80].

2.1.1

Text Formatting

Before moving from step 1 of analyzing a document to step 2 of processing its individual elements, it is critical that each document be in ASCII or some similar (editable) format. This seems like a standard requirement, but one must remember that some documents are added into collections by optical character reader (OCR) scanners and may be recast in formats such as postscript. Such a format restricts searching because it exists more as an image rather than a collection of individual, searchable elements. Documents can be converted from postscript to ASCII files, even to the point that special and critical elements of the document such as the title, author, and date can be flagged and processed appropriately [44]. Search engine developers must also determine how they are going to index the text. Later, in the next section, we will discuss the process of item normalization (use of stop lists, stemmers, and the like), which is typically performed after the search engine has selected which text to index.

14

Chapter 2. Document File Preparation

2.1.2

Validation

Producing valid HTML files, unfortunately, is not as straightforward as one would expect. The lack of consistent tagging (by users) and nonstandard software for HTML generation produces erroneous webpages that can make both parsing and displaying a nightmare. On-line validation services, however, are making a difference in that users can submit their webpage(s) for review and perhaps improve their skills in HTML development. An excellent resource for webpage/HTML validation is provided by the W3C HTML Validation Service at http://validator.w3.org/. Users can submit the URL of their webpage for validation. To identify (or specify) which version of HTML is used within a particular webpage, the formal public identifier (FPI) comment line is commonly used. A sample FPI declaration for the W3C 4.0 HTML syntax is provided in Figure 2.1. <TITLE>Example

Figure 2.1: FPI for HTML conforming to the W3C 4.0 standard.

2.2

Manual Indexing

Manual indexing, or indexing that is done by a person, connotes visions of dedicated men and women willingly locked into small windowless rooms, sit-

2.2. Manual Indexing

15

ting at sparse desks hunched over stacks of papers, reading, and underlining keywords for the index. On coffee breaks, the indexers gather in the small break room and debate the nuances of language and exchange anecdotes about the surprising relationships between seemingly incongruent subjects. Because of the exponential growth of the Web, from 320 million indexable pages in 1998 [53] to over four billion pages in 2004,l you would think that manual indexers must have gone the way of bank tellers and full service gas station attendants. In 2002, Yahoo! discontinued its practice of using manual indexers to look at submitted URLs before sending their crawlers out to index them. However, smaller web directories still exist on the Web, but they are characterized by their focus on specific topics rather than trying to index millions of pages. One upside of these smaller web subject directories is not only that the results are more relevant but also that human intervention greatly reduces "the probability of retrieving results out of context" [82]. In addition to the small web directories that still populate the Web, there are still major players in the information industry who prefer having documents analyzed individually. Some examples include the following: • National Library of Medicine. The National Library of Medicine is the publisher of MEDLINE (Medical Literature, Analysis and Retrieval System Online), a bibliographic database of over 15 million references. Available free-of-charge on the Web via PubMed (www.pubmed.gov), MEDLINE relies heavily on freelance contractors located throughout the world to index half a million references annually. Only 27 of MEDLINE's 144 indexers are in-house staffers. Indexers assign keywords that match MeSH, the Medical Subject Headings Index. However, according to MEDLINE's Head of Indexing, James Marcetich, MEDLINE has added an automated indexer called the medical text indexer (MTI), which automatically indexes the title and abstract and gives the manual indexer some assistance by providing a list of potential MeSH keywords. (But not all of them use it, says Marcetich.) With an expected increase in workload (a million documents a year to index by 2011), Marcetich expects the MTI to play a more important role in the years to come. 1

Estimating the size of the Web is anyone's educated guess. At the time of this writing, Google claimed over four billion pages indexed. Other estimates suggest that the "hidden" or "deep" Web, the maze of pages that are not readily available for crawling, could be easily over 500 billion pages [68].

16

Chapter 2. Document File Preparation • H. W. Wilson Company. H.W. Wilson Company, publishers of the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature and other indexes, places major importance on having people assign subject headings. Working entirely out of the home office in Bronx, New York, 85 full-time indexers and editors add over 500,000 records to H.W. Wilson index publications annually. According to the Director of Indexing, Mark Gauthier, the publisher's indexing program is not machine-assisted but instead still relies on the "intellectual process of indexers." When the H.W. Wilson reevaluated their whole system from a cost perspective a couple years ago, it decided to concentrate its automation efforts on streamlining the process of getting information from the indexer to the publication rather than trying to replace manual indexing with automated indexing. "Our indexers are very fast, consistent and have a remarkable institutional memory," says Gauthier. • Cinahl. The California-based Cinahl Information Systems manually indexes 1750 journals in the nursing and allied health disciplines, which includes such disciplines as physical and occupational therapy, alternative therapy, chiropractric medicine, gerontology, and biomedicine. The equivalent of 15 full-time indexers add 2500 to 3000 records a week to Cinahl's million-document database. Cinahl's Managing Director, June Levy, says that they have looked at automatic indexing software and will continue do so but only to assist their indexers and not replace them. Levy says that manual indexers are able to "pick up on the nuances of human language" that machines simply cannot do(

For the information industry to still make such an effort and expense to manually assign terms indicates the importance information professionals place in being able to recognize relationships and concepts in documents. It is this ability to identify the broader, narrower, and related subjects that keeps manual indexing a viable alternative in an industry that is somewhat dominated by automatic indexing, It also provides a goal for the automatic indexing system of being able to accurately forge relationships between documents that on the surface are not lexically linked.

2.3

Automatic Indexing

Automatic indexing, or using algorithms/software to extract terms for indexing, is the predominant method for processing documents from large web

2.3. Automatic Indexing

17

databases. In contrast to the connotation of manual indexers being holed up in their windowless rooms, the vision of automatic indexes consists of huge automatic computerized robots crawling throughout the Web all day and night, collecting documents and indexing every word in the text. This latter vision is probably as overly romanticized as the one for the manual indexers, especially considering that the robots are stationary and make requests to the servers in a fashion similar to a user making a request to a server. Another difference between manual and automatic indexing is that concepts are realized in the indexing stage, as opposed to the document extraction/collection stage. This characteristic of automatic indexing places additional pressure on the search engine builder to provide some means of searching for broader, narrower, or related subjects. Ultimately, though, the goal of each system is the same: to extract from the documents the words which will allow a searcher to find the best documents to meet his or her information needs.

Major Commercial Search Engines By looking at the features of some of major search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and Ask Jeeves one can get a general idea of how major search engines do their automatic indexing. It can also offer insights on the types of decisions a search engine builder must make when extracting index terms. Each search engine usually has its own crawler, which is constantly indexing millions of pages a day from the Web. While some crawlers just randomly search, others are specifically looking at previously indexed pages for updated information or are guided by user submissions. More heavily traveled websites are usually checked more often, whereas less popular websites may be visited only once a month. While studying automatic indexing, keep in mind that the search engine or crawler grabs only part of the webpage and copies it into a more localized database. This means that when a user submits a query to the search engine, only that particular search engine's representation (or subset) of the Web is actually searched. Only then are you directed to the appropriate (current) URL. This explains in part why links from search results are invalid or redirected and the importance of search engines to update and refresh their existing databases.

18

Chapter 2. Document File Preparation

Major Commercial Search Engines, contd. However, there are limits to what search engines are willing or able to index per webpage. For example, Google's web crawler grabs around 100K of webpage text, whereas Yahoo! pulls about 500K [75]. Once webpages are pulled in, guidelines are set in advance on what exactly is indexed. Since most of the documents are written in HTML, each search engine must decide what to do with frames, password protected sites, comments, meta tags, and images. Search engine designers must determine which parts of the document are the best indicators of what the document is about for future ranking. Depending on the ''philosophy'' of the search engine, words from the <TITLE> and <META> tags are usually scrutinized as well as the links that appear on the page. Keeping counts or word frequencies within the entire document/webpage is essential for weighting the overall importance of words (see Section 3.2.1). There are many reasons why search engines automatically index. The biggest reason is time. Besides, there is no way that the search engine could copy each of the millions of documents on the Web without exhausting available storage capacity. Another critical reason for using this method is to control how new documents are added to the collection. If one tried to "index on the fly" it would be difficult to control the flow of how new documents are added to the Web. Retrieving documents and building an index provides a manageable infrastructure for information retrieval and storage. One of the most dramatic changes for major commercial search engines in the past several years has been the shift from using term weighting to link structure-based analysis to determine how pages rank when search results are returned. In other words, the more relevant pages are the ones that have authoritative pages that point to them. Moreover, these same relevant pages point to other authoritative pages. Google has taken these link structure-based techniques to become the major player in the commercial search engine marketplace [68]. By simply observing how current major search engines go about their business, search engine builders can glean two important bits of advice. One is to recognize the need of systematically building an index and how to control additions to the text corpus. Second, examining other search engines underscores the necessity of proper file preparation and cleanup.

2.4. Item Normalization

2.4

19

Item Normalization

Building an index is more than just extracting words and building a data structure (e.g., term-by-document matrix) based on their occurrences. The words must be sliced and diced before being placed into any inverted file structure (see Section 2.5). This pureeing process is referred to as item normalization. Kowalski in [45] summarizes it as follows: "The first step in any integrated system is to normalize the incoming items to a standard format. In addition to translated multiple external formats that might be received into a single consistent data structure that can be manipulated by the functional processes, item normalization provides logical restructuring of the item. Additional operations during item normalization are needed to create a searchable data structure: identification of processing tokens (e.g., words), characterizations of tokens, and stemming (e.g., removing word endings) of the tokens. The original item or any of its logical subdivisions is available for the user to display. The processing tokens and their characterizations are used to define the searchable text from the total received text." In other words, part of the document preparation is taking the smallest unit of the document, in most cases words, and constructing searchable data structures. Words are redefined as the symbols (letters, numbers) between interword symbols such as blanks. A searching system must make decisions on how to handle words, numbers, and punctuation. Documents are not just made up of words: they are composed of processing tokens. Identifying processing tokens constitutes the first part of item normalization. The characterization of tokens or disambiguation of terms (i.e., deriving the meaning of a word based on context) can be handled after normalization is complete. A good illustration of the effort and resources required to characterize tokens automatically can be found in the National Library of Medicine's unified medical language system (UMLS) project. For over a decade, the UMLS has been working on enabling computer systems to understand medical meaning [64]. The Metathesaurus is one of the components of the UMLS and contains half a million biomedical concepts with over a million different concept names. Obviously, to do this, automated processing of the

20

Chapter 2, Document File Preparation

machine-readable versions of its 40 source vocabularies is necessary, but it also requires review and editing by subject experts. The next step in item normalization is applying stop lists to the collection of processing tokens. Stop lists are lists of words that have little or no value as a search term. A good example of a stop list is the list of stop words from the SMART system at Cornell University (see ftp: / / f t p . cs. Cornell. edu/ pub/smart/english.stop). Just a quick scroll through this list of words (able, about, after, allow, became, been, before, certainly, clearly, enough, everywhere, etc.) reveals their limited impact in discriminating concepts or potential search topics. From the data compression viewpoint, stop lists eliminate the need to handle unnecessary words and reduce the size of the index and the amount of time and space required to build searchable data structures. However, the value of removing stop words for a compressed inverted file is questionable [86]. Applying a stop list does reduce the size of the index, but the words that are omitted are typically those that require the fewest bits per pointer to store so that the overall savings in storage is not that impressive. Although there is little debate over eliminating common words, there is some discussion on what to do about eingletons or words that appear only once or very infrequently in a document or a collection. Some indexers may feel that the probability of searching with such a term is small or the importance of a such a word is so minimal that it should be included in the stop list also. Stemming, or the removing of suffixes (and sometimes prefixes) to reduce a word to its root form, has a relatively long tradition in the index building process. For example, words from a document database such as reformation, reformative, reformatory, reformed, and reformism can all be stemmed to the root word reform (perhaps a little dangerous to remove the re- prefix). All five words would map to the word reform in the index. This saves the space of four words in the index. However, if a user queries for information about the Reformation and some of the returned documents describe reformatories (i.e., reform schools), it could leave the user scratching his or her head wondering about the quality of the search engine. If the query from the user is stemmed, there are advantages and disadvantages also. Stemming would help the user if the query was misspelled and Stemming handles the plurals and common suffixes, but again there is always the risk that stemming will cause more nonrelevant items to be pulled more readily from the database. Also stemming proper nouns, such as the words that originate from database fields like author, is usually not done.

2.5. Inverted File Structures

21

Stemming can be done in various ways, but it is not a task to be regarded lightly. Stemming can be a tedious undertaking, especially considering that decisions must be made and rules developed for thousands of words in the English language. Fortunately, several automatic stemmers utilizing different approaches have been developed. As suggested by [44, 45, 86], the Porter Stemmer is one of the industry stalwarts. A public domain version (written in C) is available for downloading at http://www.tartarus.org/~martin/ PorterStemmer/index.html. The Porter Stemmer approach is based on the sequences of vowels and consonants, whereas other approaches follow the general principle of looking up the stem in a dictionary and assigning the stem that best represents the word.

2.5

Inverted File Structures

One of the universal linchpins of all information retrieval and database systems is the inverted file structure (IFS), a series of three components that track which documents contain which index terms. IFSs provide a critical shortcut in the search process. Instead of searching the entire document database for specific terms in a query, the IFS organizes the information into an abbreviated list of terms, which then, depending on the term, references a specific set of documents. It is just like picking up a geography reference book and looking for facts about the Appalachian Mountains. You can turn page by page and eventually find your facts, or you can check the index, which immediately directs you to the pages that have facts about the Appalachian Mountains. Both methods work, but the latter is usually much quicker. As mentioned earlier, there are three components in the IFS: • The document file is where each document is given a unique number identifier and all the terms (processing tokens) within the document are identified. • The dictionary is a sorted list of all the unique terms (processing tokens) in the collection along with pointers to the inversion list. • The inversion list contains the pointer from the term to which documents contain that term. (In a book index, the pointer would be the page number where the term Appalachian would be found.)

22

Chapter 2. Document File Preparation

To illustrate the use of the IFS, we have created a two-stanza limerick about a searcher and her query. Bread Search There once was a searcher named Hanna, Who needed some info on manna. She put "rye" and "wheat" in her query Along with "potato" or "cranbeery," But no mention of "sourdough" or "banana." Instead of rye, cranberry, or wheat, The results had more spiritual meat. So Hanna was not pleased, Nor was her hunger eased, 'Cause she was looking for something to eat. 2.5.1

Document File

The first step in creating the IFS is extracting the terms that should be used in the index and assigning each document a unique number. For simplicity's sake each line of the limerick can be used to represent a document (see Table 2.1). Not only is the punctuation removed, but keep in mind that common, often-used words have little value in searching and thus reside in the stop lists and are not pulled for the index. This means that a significant Table 2.1: Documents (records) defined by limerick. 1 There once was a searcher named Hanna 2 Who needed some info on manna 3

She put rye and wheat in her query

4 5

Along with potato or cranbeery But no mention of sourdough or banana

6 Instead of rye cranberry or wheat 7 The results had more spiritual meat 8 So Hanna. was not pleased 9 Nor was her hunger eased 10 Cause she was looking for something to eat

2.5. Inverted File Structures

23

percentage of the words are not indexed, reducing the storage space requirements for the system. Even so, for purposes of this example, we were liberal in selecting terms to be used in the index (see Table 2.2). Table 2.2: Terms extracted (parsed) from limerick. Doc. No. Terms/Keywords 1 searcher, Hanna 2 manna 3 rye, wheat, query 4 potato, cranbeerya 5 sourdough, banana 6 rye, cranberry a , wheat 7 spiritual, meat 8 Hanna 9 hunger 10 No terms a

The words cranberry and cranbeery would probably stem to the same root word, cranb. This illustrates the value of stemming if a word is misspelled or the writer of the document — in this case the poet — has taken too much license.

2.5.2

Dictionary List

The second step would be to extract the terms and create a searchable dictionary of terms. To facilitate searching, the terms could be arranged alphabetically; however, there are other time and storage saving strategies that can be implemented. Instead of whole words, the processing tokens are broken down to a letter-by-letter molecular level for specific data structure implementations, that is, a reorganization of the data in such a way to allow more efficient searching. Two well-known data structures for processing dictionaries are N-grams and PAT trees. Kowalski [45] gives an overview of both methods and includes references for more understanding, but for the purposes of explaining IFSs, it is unnecessary to go into more detail. Sometimes the dictionary list might also indicate the number of times the term appears in the document database, such as the list for the Bread Search document collection created in Table 2.3.

24

Chapter 2. Document File Preparation Table 2.3: Dictionary list for the limerick. Term banana cranb Hanna hunger manna meat potato query rye sourdough spiritual wheat

2.5.3

Global Frequency 1 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 1 2

Inversion List

The final step in building an IFS is to combine the dictionary list and the document list to form what is called the inversion list. The inversion list points to a specific document(s) when a term is selected. For the limerick example, if the query contained the term wheat, documents (lines) 3 and 6 will be retrieved. In addition to pointing to a specific document, inverted lists can be constructed to point to a particular zone or section of the document where the term is used. Table 2.4 illustrates how both the document and position of a term can be recorded in the inverted list. Notice that the first occurrence of the word wheat is in document 3 at position 5 (i.e., it is the fifth word). Inverted lists can certainly be more sophisticated than what has been described thus far, especially when the search engine must support contiguous word phrases. A contiguous word phrase is used when specific word combinations are requested by the user. Using the frustrated searcher Hanna, let us say she queried on banana bread. In other words, she wants to pull only documents where the word banana is next to the word bread. If the inverted list stores the position of each ward, then such a determination can be made. Some systems are designed to measure how close terms are to each other, i.e., their proximity. For example, a user might want documents that contain only banana if it is within five words of bread. Obviously, it is a

25

2.5. Inverted File Structures Table 2.4: Inversion list for the limerick example. Term banana cranb Hanna hunger manna meat potato query rye sourdough spiritual wheat

(Doc. No., Position) (5,7) (4,5); (6,4) (1,7); (8,2) (9,4) (2,6) (7,6) (4,3) (3,8) (3,3); (6,3) (5,5) (7,5) (3,5); (6,6)

useful feature, and many systems can do this, but there is a slight trade-off in systems that support contiguous word phrases and proximity measures — higher storage requirements and computational costs. Also there is no hard and fast rule that only one inverted file system can be created for a document collection. Separate IFSs can be developed for different zones or portions of the documents such as the title or abstract. An inverted file system could be built just for authors with a special set of rules such as no stop lists. This allows the user to search quicker on specific fields within the database. Besides serving as an example of an IFS and reinforcing the adage that life does imitate art — or in this case life imitates bad poetry — Bread Search also illustrates the blur between searching for concepts and more concrete items. In Bread Search, Hanna could have been searching a biblical database about manna, the bread-like food provided by God to the Israelites during their exodus from Egypt. But manna has conceptual connotations as well, mainly as a metaphor of something that can be spiritually nourishing. Perhaps in a future search in the same biblical database, Hanna could be looking for activities that give a person spiritual nourishment and regeneration — the bread of life. Hopefully, Hanna's results will include more than just recipes.

26

2.5.4

Chapter 2. Document File Preparation

Other File Structures

While the IFS is commonly used to build an index, there are other approaches. One alternative is the use of signature files in which words/terms are converted into binary strings (composed of zeros and ones). Words from a query are mapped to their signatures, and the search involves matching bit positions with the (precomputed) signatures of the items/documents. In one sense, the signature file takes an opposite approach compared to the IFS. Whereas the IFS matches the query with the term, the signature file eliminates all nonmatches. After superimposing different signature files, the query signature is compared, and the nonmatches fall by the wayside. In general, the documents corresponding to the remaining signatures are then searched to see if the query terms do indeed exist in those documents. Figure 2.2 illustrates how one of the verses (ignoring punctuation) from the limerick in Section 2.5 might be encoded as a block signature. Here, the first three characters of each word/term in the verse are translated into 8-bit strings according to the hash function f ( c ) — 3 = cos6>5 = cos6>6 = 0.500000. For the query vector q (Child Home Safety), the rank-5 representation of A + E produces only 2 nonzero cosines, cos $2 = 0.666667 and cos 63 = 0.816497, so that the previous similarity with document D4 (albeit rather small) has been lost. With a cosine threshold of 0.5 (see Section 3.1.2), we would pick up the relevant document D3 for the query q but lose the relevant document D4 for query q. Hence, minor rank reduction does not necessarily improve matching for all queries. If we wanted to further reduce the rank of R in equation (4.7), we might include both the fifth row and column in H In this situation, we would have ||R22||^/||-R||F — 0.7559 so that the discarding of R22 for a rank-4 approximation of the original term-by-document matrix A would produce a relative change of almost 76%. The nonzero cosines for the query vector q mentioned above would be cos 02 — 0.408248, cos 03 — 0.308607, cos 04 — 0.183942, cos 05 = cos6/6 = 0.500000, and cos0 7 = 0.654654. Although the relevant document D4 is now barely similar to the query (Child Proofing], we find that the completely unrelated document D7 is now judged as the most similar. For the query vector q (Child Home Safety), the rank-4 approximation produces the nonzero cosines cos fa — 0.666667, cos $3 — 0.755929, cos04 = 0.100125, and cos Of — 0.356348. Here again, an increase in the

4.2. Singular Value Decomposition

51

number of irrelevant documents (D7) matched may coincide with attempts to match documents (D4) previously missed with larger ranks. Explanations as to why one variant (rank reduction) of a term-by-document matrix works better than another for particular queries are not consistent. As further discussed in [7], it is possible to improve the performance of a vector space IR model (e.g., LSI) by reducing the rank of the term-by-document matrix A. Note that even the 32% change in A used above for the rank-5 approximation can be considered quite large in the context of scientific or engineering applications where accuracies of three or more decimal places (0.1% error or better) are needed.

4.2

Singular Value Decomposition

In Section 4.1, we demonstrated the use of the QR factorization to generate document vectors of any specific dimension. While this approach does provide a reduced-rank basis for the column space of the term-by-document matrix .A, it does not provide any information about the row space of A. In this section, we introduce an alternate SVD-based approach (although more demanding from a computational standpoint), which provides reduced-rank approximations to both spaces. Furthermore, the SVD has the unique mathematical feature of providing the rank-fc approximation to a matrix A of minimal change for any value of k. The SVD of the m x n term-by-document matrix A is written

where U is the m x m orthogonal matrix whose columns define the left singular vectors of .A, V is the n x n orthogonal matrix whose columns define the right singular vectors of A, and S is the m x n diagonal matrix containing the singular values <j\ > u^ > • • • > 0"min(m,n) °f A in order along its diagonal. We note that this factorization exists for any matrix A and that methods for computing the SVD of both dense [33] and sparse matrices (see Chapter 9) are well documented. The relative sizes of the factors 17, S, and V for the cases m > n and m < n are illustrated in Figure 4.1. All off-diagonal elements of the £ matrix are zeros. Both the SVD A = UEVT and the QR factorization AP = QR can be used to reveal the rank (TA) of the matrix A. Recall that TA is the

52

Chapter 4. Matrix Decompositions

Figure 4.1; Component matrices of the SVD [7]. number of nonzero diagonal elements of R. Similarly, TA is also the number of nonzero diagonal elements of S. Whereas the first TA columns of Q form a basis for the column space,4 so do the first r& columns of U. Since a rank-A; approximation to A, where k < TA-, can be constructed by ignoring (or setting equal to zero) all but the first k rows of R, we can define an alternative rank-& appr6ximation (Ak) to the matrix A by setting all but the /c-largest singular values of A equal to zero. As discussed in [7, 8], this approximation is in fact the closest rank-fc approximation to A according to a theorem by Eckart and Young in [28, 62]. This theorem demonstrated that the error in approximating A by AK is given by

4

The first TA rows of VT form a basis for the row space of A.

4.2. Singular Value Decomposition

53

where AK = , Uk and Vk comprise the first k columns of U and V, respectively, and EK is the k x k diagonal matrix containing the /c-largest singular values of A. In other words, the error in approximating the original term-by-document matrix A by A^ is determined by the truncated (or discarded) singular values ( The SVD of the matrix A in Figure 3.1 is A = [7SVT, where / 0 6977 0 2619 0 3527 0 1121 0 2619 [/[:,!: 5] 0 1874 0 3527 0 2104 \ o 1874

/ -0.0157 0.2468 0.0066 -0.4842 0.2468 £7[:,6:9] = 0.2287 0.0066 -0.7340 V 0.2287

yi

0. 0931 -0. 2966 0. 4491 -0. 1410 -0. 2966 -0. 3747 0. 4491 -0. 3337 -0. 3747

-0 0175 -0 4681 0 1017 0 1478 -0 4681 0 5049 0 1017 -0 0954 0 5049

0 6951 0 \ -0 1969 0 -0 4013 -0.7071 0 0733 0 -0 1969 0 , -0 1270 0 -0 4013 0.7071 -0 2820 0 -0 1270 0 /

-0.1441 0 0 \ 0.1570 -0.6356 0.3099 0.0493 0 0 0.8402 0 0 0.1570 0.6356 -0.3099 , -0.0338 -0.3099 -0.6356 0.0493 0 0 0 -0.4657 0 — 0.0338 0.3099 0.6356 /

/ 1 5777 0 0 0 0 0 0 \ 1.2664 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1. 1890 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.7962 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.7071 0 0.5664 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.1968 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 ) V

54

Chapter 4. Matrix Decompositions / 0.1680 0.4471 0.2687 0.3954 0.4708 0.3162 v 0.4708 0.5710 0.4872 -0.2451 -0.6132 -0.0113 0.0166 -0.0113

-0.4184 0.6005 -0.2256 0\ -0.2280 -0.4631 0.2185 0 0 -0.4226 -0.5009 -0.4900 -0.3994 0.3929 0 0.1305 0.0501 0.7071 0.3028 0.2609 0.5015 0 0.1210 -0.7128 0.3028 0.0501 0.2609 -0.7071 / -0.2432 \ 0.4986 -0.4451 0.3697 -0.3405 0.3542 -0.3405 /

This matrix A (of rank TA — 7) has 7 nonzero singular values, and the 2 trailing zero rows of the diagonal matrix E indicate that the first 7 columns of U (i.e., U1, U2, . . . , Uj) determine a basis for the column space of A. From equation (4.7), we know that \\A — A§\\p = a± — 0.1968 so that \\A - 46||F/||A||F ~ 0.0744 for \\A\\F = 2.6458. Hence, producing a rank-6 approximation to the original matrix A reflects only a 7% relative change from A. Reductions to rank 5 and rank 3 would reflect relative changes of 23% and 46%, respectively. If changes of 46% are deemed too large (compared to the initial uncertainty in the original term-by-document matrix A), then modest rank reductions (say from 7 to 5) may be more appropriate for this small text collection. To accept a 5-dimensional subspace and the corresponding matrix A5 as the best representation of the semantic structure of a collection/database implies that any further rank reduction will not model the true content of the collection. The choice of rank that produces the optimal performance of LSI (for any database) remains an open question and is normally decided via empirical testing [7, 8]. For very large databases, the number of dimensions used may be between 100 and 300 [57]. The choice here is typically governed by computational feasibility, as opposed to accuracy. Keep in mind that among all possible rank-A; matrix approximations to A, the matrix Ak via SVD factors does produce the best approximation.

4.2. Singular Value Decomposition

4.2.1

55

Low-Rank Approximations

Recall from Section 4.1 that relative changes of 32% and 76% were required to reduce the rank of the matrix A from Figure 3.1 to 5 and 4, respectively. Using the SVD, the relative changes required for reductions to ranks 5 and 4 are considerably less, i.e., 23% and 35%. As pointed out in [7], a visual comparison of the rank-reduced approximations to A can be misleading. Notice the similarity of the rank-4 QR-based approximation (A4) to the original term-by-document matrix A in Figure 4.2. The more accurate SVDbased approximation (A4) is only mildly similar to A. It is interesting to note that (by construction) the term-by-document matrix A will have nonnegative elements (weighted frequencies) (see Section 3.1.1). From Figure 4.2, we see that both A4 and A^ have negative elements (which reflect various linear combinations of the elements of the matrix A). While this may seem problematic, the individual components of document vectors (columns of Ak) are not typically used to define semantic content. In other words, the geometric relationships between vectors (e.g., cosines) in the vector space are used to model concepts spanned by both terms and documents (see Section 3.2.3). Notice, for example, that the first document vector (column) in the rank-4 matrix A4 has (positive) components associated with terms which did not occur in the original document Dl: A 4 (4,1) = 0.1968 and A4(8,1) = 0.2151. The vector representation of this document (Dl: Infant & Toddler First Aid) now has components associated with the relevant terms T4: Health and T8: Safety. This ability to automatically associate related terms (without human intervention) is the hallmark of vector space modeling and motivation for low-rank approximation techniques.

4.2.2

Query Matching

As was done for the QR factorization in Section 4.1, query matching can be formulated using the component matrices of the SVD. This particular formulation is the foundation of vector space IR models such as LSI (see Chapter 3). Suppose we want to compare the query vector q to the columns of the reduced-rank matrix Ak (as opposed to the original mxn term-by-document matrix A). Suppose the vector GJ denotes the j'th canonical vector of dimension n (i.e., the j'th column of the n x n identity matrix In}. Then, it follows that the vector A^CJ is simply the jth column of the rank-K matrix Ak.

Chapter 4. Matrix Decompositions

56

The original 9x7 term-by-document matrix A is 0 0.5774 0 0 0.5774 0.5774 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.5774 0.5774 0.7071 0 0 0 0 0 0.5774 0 0 0 0 v 0.7071

/

0.7071 0 0.7071 \ 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 .7071 0.7071 0 0 0.4472 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.4472 0 0 0 0.7071 0 .7071 0 0 0 0.4472 0 0 0 J 0.4472 0 0.4472

The rank-4 approximation (Ai computed using the QR factorization is

/ o

0.5774 0.5774 0 0 0 0 0 0.5774 0 0.7071 0 0 0 0 0 V 0.7071 0

0 0.5774 0 0 0.5774 0 0 0.5774 0

0.4472 0 0

0.4472 0

0.4472 0

0.4472 0.4472

0.5983 0.0544 0 0.2176 0.0544 0 0 -0.1088 0

0 0.5983 \ 0 0.0544 0 0 0 0.2176 , 0 0.0544 0 0 0 0 0 -0 1088 0 0 /

and the rank-4 approximation (Ai) via the SVD is / -0.0018 0 .5958 -0.0148 0.4523 0.6974 0. 0102 0. 6974 \ -0.0723 0 .4938 0.6254 0.0743 0.0121 -0.0133 0.0121 0.0002 -0 .0067 0.0052 -0.0013 0.3569 0. 7036 0. 3569 0.1968 0 .0512 0.0064 0.2179 0.0532 -0.0540 0.0532 -0.0723 0 .4938 0.6254 0.0743 0.0121 -0. 0133 0. 0121 . 0.6315 -0 .0598 0.0288 0.5291 -0.0008 0. 0002 -0.0008 0.0002 -0 .0067 0,0052 -0.0013 0.3569 0. 7036 0. 3569 0.2151 0 .2483 0.4347 0.2262 -0.0359 0. 0394 -0.0359 ^ 0,6315 -0 .0598 0.0288 0.5291 -0.0008 0.0002 -0.0008 / Figure 4.2: The term-by-document matrix A and its two rank-4 approximations A A.

4.2. Singular Value Decomposition

57

Similar to equation (4.5), the cosines of the angles between the query vector q and the n document vectors (or columns) of Ak can be represented by

For the scaled document vector Sj =Ekvk ej , the formula in equation (4.8) can be simplified to

This implies that one need not explicitly form the rank-fc matrix Ak from its SVD factors (Uk, Ek, Vk) and that the norms \\Sj 2 can be computed once, stored, and retrieved for all query processing. The k elements of the vector Sj are the coordinates of the jth column of Ak in the basis defined by the columns of U^,. In addition, the k elements of the vector U^q are the coordinates in that basis of the projection UkU^q of the query vector q into the column space of A^ [7]. An alternate formula for the cosine computation in equation (4.9) is

where the cost of computing the projected query vector U^q is usually minimal (i.e., q is typically sparse if the user supplies only a few search terms). For all document vectors (sj), cos#7 > cosOj so that a few more relevant documents may sometimes be retrieved if equation (4.10) rather than equation (4.9) is used. 4.2.3

Software

In order to compute the SVD of sparse term-by-document matrices, it is important to store and use only the nonzero elements of the matrix (see Section 3.2.2). Numerical methods for computing the SVD of a sparse matrix

58

Chapter 4. Matrix Decompositions

include iterative methods such as Arnoldi [56], Lanczos [47, 67], subspace iteration [67, 70], and trace minimization [74]. All of these methods reference the sparse matrix A only through matrix-vector multiplication operations, and all can be implemented in terms of the sparse storage formats discussed in Section 3.2.2. Chapter 9 provides several references and websites that provide both algorithms and software for computing the SVD of sparse matrices. For relatively small term-by-document matrices, one may be able to ignore sparsity altogether and consider the matrix A as dense. The LAPACK [1] Fortran library provides portable and robust routines for computing the SVD of dense matrices. MATLAB [60] provides the dense SVD function [U,Sigma,V]=svd(A) if A is stored as a dense matrix and [U,Sigma,V] = svd(full(A)) if A is stored as a sparse matrix. MATLAB (Version 5.1) also provides a function to compute a few of the largest singular values and corresponding singular vectors of a sparse matrix. If the k largest singular values and corresponding left and right singular vectors are required, the MATLAB command [Uk,Sigmak,Vk] = svds(A,k) can be used. The sparse SVD function svds is based on the Arnoldi methods described in [55]. Less expensive factorizations such as QR (Section 4.1) and the ULV decomposition [12] can be alternatives to the SVD, whether A is dense or sparse.

4.3

Semidiscrete Decomposition

As discussed in [7], no genuine effort has been made to preserve sparsity in the reduced-rank approximation of term-by-document matrices. Since the singular vector matrices are often dense, the storage requirements for U^, Sfc, and Vfc can vastly exceed those of the original term-by-document matrix. Semidiscrete decomposition (SDD) [43] provides one means of reducing the storage requirements of IR models such as LSI, In SDD, only the three values ( — 1,0,1} (represented by two bits each) are used to define the elements of Uk and Vk, and a sequence of integer programming problems are solved to produce the decomposition. These mixed integer programming problems can with solutions (triplets) of the form ^G represented by

4.4. Updating Techniques

59

where Sj denotes the j-dimensional subspace spanned by vectors whose components are in the set { — 1, 0,1}, Rk = A — A^-i, and A0 = 0. As discussed in [43], the storage economization achieved by the SDD can result in almost a 100% reduction in memory required by the term (Uk) and document (Vk) vectors at the cost of a much larger (sometimes as much as 50%) rank (k) and subsequent computational time.

4.4

Updating Techniques

Unfortunately, once you have created an index using a matrix decomposition such as the SVD (or SDD) it will probably be obsolete in a matter of seconds. Dynamic collections (e.g., webpages) mandate the constant inclusion (or perhaps deletion) of new information. For vector space IR models based on the SVD (e.g., LSI), one approach to accommodate additions (new terms or documents) is to recompute the SVD of the new term-by-document matrix, but, for large collections, this process can be very costly in both time and space (i.e., memory). More tractable approaches such as folding-in, SVD-updating, and SDD-updating are well documented [7, 8, 43, 66, 77]. The procedure referred to as folding-in is fairly inexpensive computationally but typically produces an inexact representation of the updated collection. It is generally appropriate to fold-in only a few documents (or terms) at a time. Updating, while more expensive, preserves (or restores) the representation of the collection as if the SVD (or similar decomposition) had been recomputed. We will briefly review the folding-in procedure in light of our discussion on query matching in Section 4.2.2 and provide further (comprehensive) reading material on updating the decompositions of sparse term-by-document matrices in Chapter 9. Folding a new document vector into the column space of an existing termby-document is synonymous with finding the coordinates for that document in an existing basis (t/fc). To fold a new ra x 1 document vector p into the (/c-dimensional) column space of an m x n term-by-document matrix A means to project p onto that space [7]. If p represents the projection of p, then it follows (see Section 4.2.2) that

Hence, the coordinates (k of. them) for p in the basis Uk are determined by the elements of

60

Chapter 4. Matrix Decompositions

The new document is then folded-in by appending (as a new column) the k-dimensional vector U to the existing k x n matrix S^V^, where n is the number of previously indexed documents. In the event that the matrix product SfcV^ is not explicitly computed, we can simply append as a new row of 14 to form a new matrix V^. The product is the desired result, and we note that the matrix t4 is no longer orthonormal. In fact, the row space of the matrix V^ does not represent the row space of the new term-by-document matrix. In the event that the new document vector p is nearly orthogonal to the columns of Uk, most information about that document is lost in the projection p. From Section 3.2.3, we illustrate the folding-in of the new document D8: Safety Guide for Child Proofing Your Home

Figure 4.3: Folding-in D8 into the rank-2 LSI model from Figure 3.3.

61

4.4. Updating Techniques

into the rank-2 (SVD-based) approximation of the 9x7 term-by-document matrix A in Figure 3.1. For D8, we define

so that p=(0

0.4472

0.4472 0 0.4472 0 0.4472

0.4472 0 ) T .

The two coordinates for the projected document (p) are defined by

where the rank-2 SVD-based IR model is A2 = U^V^. Figure 4.3 illustrates the projection5 of D8 into the same 2-dimensional vector space depicted in Figure 3.3. To fold-in an n x 1 term vector w whose elements specify the documents associated with a term, w is projected into the row space of AK. If w represents the term projection of w, then

The k coordinates V^w of the projected vector w are then appended (as a new row) to the matrix Uk- In this case, we lose orthogonality in our K-dimensional basis for the column space of A (see [8, 66] for further details).

5

Similar to the comment in Section 3.2.3, an equivalent (mirrored) plot would have the coordinates of D8 as (-0.6439,0.0128).

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Chapter 5

Query Management Although a good portion of this book has been focused on the use of vector space IR models (e.g., LSI), it is important to continually remind ourselves and readers alike that there are several proven approaches used to build search engines. Other indexing models have certain strengths and limitations, and this becomes evident when one looks at query management, or the process of translating the user's query into a form that the search engine can utilize. The relationship between the system and the query has a catch-22 flavor. Selecting the most efficient search engine may depend on the type of query allowed, which in turn depends on the indexing model used by a search engine. In other words, certain types of search engine models handle certain types of queries better, but the user may have some other type of query in mind altogether. In this chapter, the focus will be on general guidelines for query management along with some discussion on the effects query types and search engines can have on each other.

5.1

Query Binding

Query binding is a general term describing the three-tier process of translating the user's need into a search engine query. The first level involves the user formulating the information need into a question or a list of terms using 63

64

Chapter 5. Query Management

his or her own experiences and vocabulary and entering it into the search engine. On the next level, the search engine must translate the words (with possible spelling errors such as cranbeery) into processing tokens (as discussed in Section 2.4). Finally, on the third level, the search engine must use the processing tokens to search the document database and retrieve the appropriate documents (see Figure 5.1).

Figure 5.1: Three phases of query binding. In practice, users (based on their work experience and skill level) may enter their query in a variety of different ways; as a Boolean statement, as a question (natural language query), as a list of terms with proximity operators and contiguous word phrases, or with the use of a thesaurus. Problems therefore arise when search engines cannot accept all types of queries [18]. A query that uses a Boolean operator such as AND or OR has to be processed differently than a natural language query. Building a search

5.2. Types of Queries

65

engine to accept a certain type of query ultimately forces the user to learn how to enter queries in that manner. This is not to say that one type of query is better than another but rather to point out that there are several types of queries, and search engine design is extremely dependent on what type of queries the search engine will accept. Part of choosing the type of query is also dependent on anticipating who will be using the search engine. A beginning or inexperienced searcher such as a high school student will probably be more comfortable with a natural language query, whereas an information professional who is familiar with advanced search features will be more comfortable with a system that can perform Boolean searches or searches using proximity parameters and contiguous word phrases.

5.2

Types of Queries

There are several types of queries. Each type should be evaluated with respect to how the user enters it and what he or she expects in return, its strengths and limitations, and compatibility with the search engine design. There are no hard and fast rules when discussing query/search engine compatibility. It is also interesting to note that the current trend for most operational systems is to apply a combination of queries with the hope that users will learn the best strategies to use for a given system [58]. Some systems are more hybrid than others and offer information seekers choices between exact (lexical) match Boolean and ranked approaches.

5.2.1

Boolean Queries

Boolean logic queries link words in the search using operators such as AND, OR, and NOT. Recall the document file in Section 2.5 (the Bread Search limerick). If the searcher wanted the document which contains the words meat OR wheat, documents three, six, and seven would be pulled, but if the searcher wanted meat AND wheat, no documents would have been pulled. Why? Because none of the lines of the limerick contain both words meat and wheat. (To keep your Boolean operators straight remember the adage, "OR gets you more.") The NOT operator is more troublesome, because it forces the system to exclude members from the pulled or returned set of results. One of the weaknesses of Boolean queries, according to [44], is that there does not appear to be a good way to gauge significance in a Boolean query.

66

Chapter 5. Query Management

Either a term is present or it is absent. Current research [44] suggests that most users of information systems are not well trained in Boolean operators (unlike computer scientists and mathematicians). For systems based on a vector space IR model, Boolean operators are typically recognized as stop words, and hence are ignored.

5.2.2

Natural Language Queries

Natural language queries (NLQs) are queries in which the user formulates as a question or a statement. Using the Bread Search limerick from Section 2.5, a viable NLQ might be Which documents have information on manna? or

Where is information on the use of manna as a connotation for spirituality? To process an NLQ, the search engine must extract all indexed terms to initiate a search. Obviously, some words in the query will be eliminated by the use of stop lists. This approach, according to Korfhage in [44], has the distinct disadvantage in that ".. .computers have difficulty extracting a term with its syntactic, semantic and pragmatic knowledge intact." In other words, once you extract a word from an NLQ, the context of how that word is used becomes lost. For example, in the NLQ once the word manna is removed from the query, then the system does not know whether the meaning is manna for bread or manna for spiritual sustenance. This is not a major concern perhaps in the case of manna, but when a word can have multiple and varied meanings (i.e., when it is polysemous), then the effect can be much more pronounced.

5.2.3

Thesaurus Queries

A thesaurus query is one where the user selects the term from a previous set of terms predetermined by the IR system. The advantage of the thesaurus query is that the first phase of query binding (see Figure 5.1) is automated

5.2. Types of Queries

67

for the user. Also, thesauri can readily expand to related concepts. On the other hand, the searcher is bound to the thesaurus term even if he or she does not think the term is the best choice. Furthermore, there can be problems with understanding the specific meaning of a word. For example, in the Bread Search limerick, if the user is using the thesaurus to search on the spiritual aspects of manna, the system may only consider manna as bread described in the Old Testament of the Bible. As mentioned by Kowalski in [45], thesauri tend to be generic to a language and can thus introduce/insert many search terms that were never indexed or found in the collection. This is less of a problem in an IR system where the thesaurus has been especially built for the database; however, the costs to do so may be prohibitive.

5.2.4

Fuzzy Queries

It seems appropriate that the concept of fuzzy searches is somewhat fuzzy itself. Fuzzy reflects nonspecificity and can be viewed in two ways. As described in [45], fuzziness in a search system refers to the capability of handling the misspelling or variations of the same words. User queries are automatically stemmed, and documents related to (or containing) the word stems are retrieved. Using the Bread Search document collection from Section 2.5, a fuzzy query, which misspelled the word cranberry as cranbeery, would still (hopefully) return documents on cranberries, as the word stem (root) cranb would be the same for both words. Fuzzy queries can also be viewed in terms of the sets of retrieved documents. It is similar to standard retrieval systems in which the retrieved documents are returned by order of relevancy. However, in the fuzzy retrieval system the threshold of relevancy is expanded to include additional documents, which may be of interest to the user (see [44]).

5.2.5

Term Searches

Perhaps the most prevalent type of query (especially on the Web) is when a user provides a few words or phrases for the search. More experienced searchers might prefer using a contiguous word phrase such as Atlanta Falcons to find information about that football team. Otherwise, if the search engine does not interpret the query as a phrase, documents about the city of Atlanta or documents about birds would more than likely be erroneously

68

Chapter 5. Query Management

retrieved. The use of contiguous phrases improves the chance of precision (see Section 6.1.1) at the risk of losing a few documents that might have been selected. For example, if an article read, In Atlanta, the Falcons host their arch rivals... it would not be retrieved (lower recall). In the next chapter on ranking and relevance feedback, the issues of precision and recall will be discussed further. On the other hand, the experienced searcher may use a proximity operator, i.e., designate to the system that he or she wants a document that has the words Atlanta and Falcons with fewer than five words between them. (In most systems, users can choose five words, ten words, and so on). As mentioned in Section 2.5, in order for systems to support proximity operators and contiguous phrases, the inversion list must track not only which terms appear in which documents but also the position of those terms in the documents. This certainly requires more storage and processing capabilities. One interesting dilemma for the user is deciding how many terms to supply. Users have a tendency to type in just two or three terms. This would be fine if the system was more match-oriented or based on the Boolean OR operator. However, if the IR system is based on a vector space model, the user may have more success with more terms. In this context, more terms means more vectors to synthesize and construct the final query vector. However, the user may not realize that the query (in this case) could be more of a pseudodocument representation for conceptual matching, as opposed to a long string of terms for lexical matching (see [7, 8, 25]).

5.2.6

Probabilistic Queries

Probabilistic queries refer to the manner in which the IR system retrieves documents according to relevancy. The premise for this type of search is that for a given document and a query it should be possible to compute a probability of relevancy for the document with respect to the query. In [44], the difference between Boolean- and vector-based matching and probabilistic matching is summarized as follows: "One concern about both Boolean- and vector-based matching is that they are based on hard criteria. In Boolean-based matching,

5.2. Types of Queries

69

either a document meets the logical conditions or it does not; in vector-based matching, a similarity threshold is set, and either a document falls above that threshold or it does not. The ability to define various similarity measures and thresholds in the vector case softens the impact of the threshold value to some extent. However, a number of researchers, believing that even this does not adequately represent the uncertainties that abound in text retrieval, focus their attention on models that include uncertainties more directly." Marchionini in [58] acknowledges that in probabilistic IR modeling there are degrees (or levels) of relevance that can be based on some estimated probability of document-query relevance. One advantage of probabilistic queries over fuzzy queries is that there is a well-established body of methods for computing probabilities from frequency data [44]. For additional reading on probabilistic IR models (theory and empirical testing), we refer the reader to [19, 52].

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Chapter 6

Ranking and Relevance Feedback Even though at first it seems that all search engines have the same basic features, one aspect that separates more full, functional search engines from their lesser counterparts is the ability not only to list the search results in a meaningful way (ranking) but also to allow the user a chance of using those results to resubmit another, more on-target query. This latter feature, referred to as relevance feedback, has been quite effective in helping users find more relevant documents with less effort [72]. Harman [36] has done extensive work in judging how relevance feedback positively affects system performance. Marchionini [58] points out another advantage of ranking and relevance feedback. As computer designers continue in their quest to make computers more receptive to users, ranking and relevance feedback can be considered as highly interactive information seeking. Along the same vein, Korfhage [44] refers to relevance feedback as a type of dialogue between user and system. Some commercial systems limit this feature and elect to forego building it into the system since relevance feedback can create computational burdens that can slow a system down. Also, it requires constant updating of the system's knowledge of itself because in order for the search engine to know if a certain document is the best it must know what every document in the system contains. By using applied mathematics, producing a rank-ordered list of documents, and relevance feedback, search engine performance can be 71

72

Chapter 6. Ranking and Relevance Feedback

improved. Subsequently, vector space IR models such as LSI (see Chapter 3) can be more readily adapted to providing relevance feedback. According to Marchionini, "The vector approach has a significant advantage over traditional indexing methods for end users, because the retrieved sets of documents can be ranked, thus eliminating the no hits result so common in exact-match systems. Experimental systems that provide ranked output have proved highly effective and commercial vendors have begun to offer ranked output features. Ranked output also provides a reasonable entry point for browsing." [58]

6.1

Performance Evaluation

A variation of the sometimes pointless adage, "It doesn't matter whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game," is applicable in evaluating the performance of search engines. In one aspect, the ultimate evaluation of any search system is determined by whether the user is satisfied with results of the search. In short, has the information need been met in a timely manner? If so, the system and the user alike are declared the winner. But this kind of simplistic thinking is, well, too simplistic. User satisfaction can certainly be measured in a variety of ways: binary (i.e., the results are acceptable or unacceptable) or relative (e.g., ranks a 5 on a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being perfect). Also, other considerations need to be addressed when evaluating a system, such as whether the user did not get the desired results because of a poor query in the first place, A misspelled word, the need for quotation marks to be added to a phrase, or lack of understanding of exactly what needs to be asked can also affect a search engine's performance. Korfhage [44] also points out that users will not tolerate more than three or four attempts of feeding back information to the system, nor does the user like seeing the same set of documents appearing over and over again. This brings out an interesting dilemma for the system designer. For example, after receiving a list of documents, suppose the user marks a certain document as retrieve more like this one. In the new return list

6.1. Performance Evaluation

73

of results, should that document be automatically at the top of the next list even though conceivably it could be ranked lower than the new set of documents? Then again, if the document is not at the top of the list, the user may wonder why. Such problems, however, have not prevented researchers from developing some standards for at least discussing and comparing the results of a search, whether it be searching on the Web, an on-line database, or a CD-ROM.

6.1.1

Precision

Unlike information science professionals who are drilled early on in their academic careers by the standard definitions of precision and recall, system designers may not be as familiar with the terms and the implications of their use. This is understandable because it is one thing to design and build a system, and it is another thing to evaluate it. Precision and recall are two of the standard definitions used in search system evaluation, and because they are so closely related they are usually discussed in tandem. The precision or precision ratio P of a search method is defined as

where Dr is the number of relevant documents retrieved and Dt is the total number of documents retrieved. It is important to keep in mind that relevance, or the appropriateness of a document to a user's needs, is still a judgment call. Two searchers can be looking for the same information in the same topic, and when the results are listed, Article 4 may strike searcher A as useful or relevant, whereas searcher B may find Article 4 to be irrelevant and not useful. Relevance is subjective and dependent on who is keeping score. Sometimes it is the end user. Sometimes it is an intermediator (an information broker, for example) who is making that determination for someone else, and sometimes it is a disinterested third party system evaluator who is simply evaluating search engines (and has no vested interest in the information itself).

6.1.2

Recall

The recall or recall ratio R of a search method is defined as

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where Dr is the same numerator from equation (6.1) and Nr is the total number of relevant documents in the collection. Recall ratios are somewhat difficult to obtain, as the total number of relevant documents is always an unknown. In other words, how does one compute the recall ratio if he or she is not really sure how many relevant documents are in the collection in the first place? However, that does not lessen the usefulness of the recall ratio. In one sense, precision and recall are on a continuum. If a searcher wants only the precise documents that fits his or her exact needs, then the query will require very specific terms. However, there is the danger or trade-off that if the search is extremely precise, many relevant documents will be missed. That explains the integral role of recall. The search must be broadened so that a significant number of relevant documents will be included in the results of the search. Again there is a another trade-off: if the recall is increased, the user more than likely will have to wade through what is known as false drops, garbage, and noise to pick out the relevant documents. What a user generally needs is a complete subset of relevant documents that does not require a substantial weeding out of all the irrelevant material.

6.1.3

Average Precision

Average precision is a common measure used in the IR community to assess retrieval performance [35]. Let rj denote the number of relevant documents up to and including position i in the (ordered) returned list of documents. The recall at the ith document in the list (the first document is assumed to be most relevant) is the proportion of relevant documents seen thus far, i.e., Ri = ri/rn. The precision at the iih document, Pi, is defined to be the proportion of documents up to including position i that are relevant to the given query. Hence, Pi — rlji. The so-called pseudoprecision at a recall level x is then defined by

Using equation (6.3), the n-point (interpolated) average precision for a query is given by

As it is common to observe retrieval at recall levels k/10, for k = 0 , 1 , . . . , 10, an n = 11 point average precision (Pav) is typically used to measure the

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75

performance of an IR system for each query. If a single measure is desired for multiple queries, the mean (or median) Pav across all queries can be recorded.

6.1.4

Genetic Algorithms

Genetic algorithms can be used in conjunction with relevance feedback calculations to monitor several relevance feedback scenarios simultaneously before choosing the best one. The premise with this combined approach is that in the normal relevance feedback situation the user makes a decision early on, and many documents are quickly discarded. However, some of those discards could be relevant or lead to relevant documents, so in a system using a genetic algorithm those discarded documents are used to create alternate paths to run in parallel to the main set of queries. Later on, the system will determine whether the alternative sets of documents merit further consideration. Korfhage has done extensive work in genetic algorithms and has dedicated several sections of his book [44] to this topic.

6.2

Relevance Feedback

An ideal IR system would achieve high precision for all levels of recall. That is, it would identify all relevant documents without returning any irrelevant ones. Unfortunately, due to problems such as polysemy and synonymy (see Chapter 3), a list of documents retrieved for a given query is hardly perfect, and the user has to discern which items to keep/read and which ones to discard. Salton in [72] and Harman in [36] have demonstrated that precision can be improved using relevance feedback, i.e., specifying which documents from a returned set are most relevant so that those documents can be used to refine/clarify the original query. Relevance feedback can be implemented using the column space of the term-by-document matrix A (see Section 3.1.2). More specifically, the query can be replaced or modified by the vector sum of the most relevant (user-judged) documents returned in order to focus the search closer to those document vectors. We will assume that the original query vector (q) lies within the column space of the matrix AK, the low-rank approximation to the term-bydocument matrix A (see Sections 3.2.3 and 4.2). Otherwise, the query vector is replaced by its projection onto that column space (UkU^q for

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SVD-encoded collections). For convenience, both query and document vectors can be represented using the same basis for the rank-fc approximation to the column space of A [7]. For SVD-based approximations (Section 4.2), this basis is determined by the columns of [/&, where Ak = [//-E^V^. The coordinates of the query vector are simply the elements of the vector U^q, and the coordinates of the ,7th column UkLkV^Zj °f the matrix Ak are the elements of the vector If a user considered, say, the tenth document (aio) of a collection to be most relevant for his or her search, then the new query qnew (based on relevance feedback) can be represented as

If the user judges a larger set of documents to be relevant, the new/modified query can be written as

where the vector element Wj is 1 if Q.J is relevant and 0 otherwise. If the user (or the IR system) desires to replace the original query by a sum of document vectors, the vector q in equation (6.5) is simply set to 0. Note that the vector U^q in equations (6.4) and (6.5) can be formed in the original cosine computation with the original query vector q. Hence, the new query (qnew) can be determined efficiently via the sum of K-dimensional vectors and then compared with all documents vectors. Following equation (4.9), we can define the vector Sj so that the appropriate cosine formula becomes

for j — 1, 2 , . . . , n. As was shown in [27], experiments have shown that replacing a query with a combination of a few of the most relevant documents to the query returned can significantly improve the precigion of LSI for some collections.

Chapter 7

Searching by Link Structure The most dramatic change in search engine design in the past several years has been developing search engines that account for the Web's hyperlink structure. LSI, with its SVD of a term-by-document matrix, is an approach that works well for smaller document collections but has problems with scalability. The computation and storage of an SVD-based LSI model for the entire Web is not tractable [49]. In general, the idea of this relatively new approach is that there are certain pages on the Web that are recognized as the "go to" places for certain information, and there is another set of pages that legitimize those esteemed positions by pointing to them with links. For example, let us say there is a website called The History of Meat and Potatoes. If enough other websites link to The History of Meat and Potatoes website, then The History of Meat and Potatoes shows up high on the list when queries are made. These "go to" places are known as authorities, and those webpages that point to authorities are known as hubs. It is a mutually reinforcing approach, with good hubs pointing to good authorities and good authorities pointing to good hubs [46]. In 1998, Jon Kleinberg of Cornell University formalized this approach with the hyperlink induced topic search (HITS) algorithm, which takes into account the Web's social network. Basically, not only does the query pull in a set of pages that matches the term, but it also evaluates webpages 77

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that link to the term. Ultimately, the user is presented with both sets of pages — the authoritative and the hub list. This is explained in more detail in Section 7.1.1. One example of how those results might appear on the screen is found at the website for the search engine Teoma (www. teoma. com). Teoma provides the user not only with a standard results lists but also a list of additional "authorities." The advantage of the HITS algorithm for web queries is that the user receives two lists of results: a set of authoritative pages he or she seeks and a set of link pages that can give a more comprehensive look at the information that is available. One major disadvantage is that these computations are made after the query is made, so the time to create the lists would be unacceptable to most users. Also, on the downside, a webmaster can skew the results by adding links to one's own page to increase the authority score and hub score [49]. Another more well-known, similar, linkage data approach is the PageRank algorithm developed by the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin [49]. Page and Brin were graduate students at Stanford in 1998 when they published a paper describing the fundamental concepts of the PageRank algorithm, which later was used as the underlying algorithm that currently drives Google [49]. Unlike the HITS algorithm, where the results are created after the query is made, Google has the Web crawled and indexed ahead of time, and the links within these pages are analyzed before the query is ever entered by the user. Basically, Google looks not only at the number of links to The History of Meat and Potatoes website — referring to the earlier example — but also the importance of those referring links. Google determines how many other Meat and Potatoes websites are also being linked to the referring site and what is important about those sites. Again, all of this is computed before the query is ever typed by the user. Once a query comes, the results are returned based on these intricate PageRank values. Although the Google search engine is in a dominant position in the web searching marketplace, it is not without its shortcomings. A strategy to improve one's position on a results page known as "Googlebombing" involves creating additional websites or manipulating weblogs (knowns as "blogs") that can beef up the number of referring links artificially [85, 37]. Like most of the major commercial search engines, Google is limited in its advanced concept matching [85]. Referring to the earlier Meat and Potatoes example, if a user queries with synonyms such as "beef," "spuds," and "history," the

7.1. HITS Method

79

chances of a results list with The History of Meat and Potatoes as one the top entries would be less likely. Also, if the user wanted to know about The History of Meat and Potatoes in China, it would be difficult to process the polysemic query term "China." Would the search engine process the term "China" as meaning China as an Asian country or china meaning "fine dishes"? See [42]. It is important to note that the HITS and the PageRank algorithms are not the only approaches that take into account the hyperlink structure of the Web. Other methods such as the stochastic approach for link structure analysis (SALSA) algorithm of Lempel and Moran combine elements of the HITS and PageRank algorithms [49]. However, in the remaining sections of this chapter, the focus shifts to the theoretical aspects of the two original link algorithms, HITS and PageRank.

7.1

HITS Method

Recall that the premise of the HITS method for modeling link structure assumes that good authorities are pointed to by good hubs and good hubs point to good authorities. Let us suppose that webpage i has an authority score ai and hub score hi. Also, let e denote the set of all directed edges in a graph of the Web whereby GIJ represents the directed edge from node (or webpage) i to node j. If we assume that every webpage has been assigned an initial authority score a\ and hub score h\ , the HITS method iteratively updates these scores by the following summations:

for k — 1, 2, 3 , . . . . As discussed in [49], the above equations can be recast in matrix notation using the adjacency matrix L (of the directed web graph) defined by

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For the 5-node web graph depicted in Figure 7.1, the 5x5 matrix L is given by

adjacency

Notice that the summations in equation (7.1) can be rewritten as the matrixvector multiplications where a^ and h^ are n x 1 vectors comprising the authority and hub scores, respectively, for each of the n nodes (webpages) in the graph. The final (or converged) authority and hub scores in a and h can be obtained by repeatedly updating equation (7.2) until a^ and h^ converge for some k. Typically, a^ and h^ are normalized after each update (iteration k) [49]. By a few simple substitutions, the HITS iteration can be written as

Figure 7.1: 5-nodo web graph.

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7.1. HITS Method

The iterations defined by equation (7.3) are essentially the steps of the power method [33] for computing the dominant eigenvectors of LTL and LLT. The matrix LTL can be thought of as the authority matrix since it is used to derive the final authority scores. Similarly, the matrix LLT can be considered the hub matrix, as its dominant eigenvector will yield the final hub scores.6 Noting that both the authority and hub matrices are positive semidefinite, the computation of a and h amounts to solving the eigensystems

where Amax is the largest eigenvalue of LTL (which is also the largest eigenvalue of LLT). As discussed in [61], each power iteration involving a^) or ft,0) should be suitably normalized to guarantee convergence to the dominant eigenvalue of LTL or LLT, respectively. Possible normalizations (see [49]) are

where m(x) is the (signed) element of maximal magnitude of x.

7.1.1

HITS Implementation

To perform query matching using HITS, one must first construct a neighborhood graph M associated with a user's query terms. The authority and hub scores for the documents (or nodes) in A/" are then computed as described in equation (7.3) and returned (along with document links) to the user. One simple way to construct N is to use an inverted list similar to the one shown in Table 2.4 in Section 2.5.3. Using the limerick example, the query meat with potato and wheat would yield an initial graph (A/") of four nodes or documents {3,4, 6, 7} based on these entries of the inversion list:

6

Term

(Doc. No., Position)

meat potato

(7,6) (4,3)

wheat

(3,5); (6,6)

A dominant eigenvector is the eigenvector which corresponds to the largest (in magnitude) eigenvalue.

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The graph N is then expanded by adding nodes (webpages) that either point (link) to the nodes in N or are pointed to by the nodes in N. This graph expansion will typically bring in related documents containing synonyms of the original query terms [49]. If a document/webpage containing several of the query terms has a large indegree (number of webpages that point to it) or large outdegree (number of webpages it points to), the resulting expanded graph could be enormous. To bound the size of N, one can simply restrict the number of nodes (or webpages) included solely as an inlink or outlink of a webpage containing any or all query terms. This process of building a neighborhood graph for a query is very similar to the process of constructing level sets in information filtering [88]. Once the graph N is fully constructed for the query, the corresponding adjacency matrix L can be constructed. As discussed in Section 7.1, the computed dominant eigenvectors of LTL and LLT yield the authority and hub scores which are then presented to the user in descending order (with the most related pages appearing first). For webpage ranking, the order of L is nowhere near the size of the Web so that HITS scoring usually incurs a relatively modest computational cost. As pointed out in [49], an additional reduction in cost can be achieved by computing only one dominant eigenvector of either L1L or LLT and deriving the other dominant eigenvector by multiplication with L or LT. For example, the authority vector a could be derived from the hub vector h (the dominant eigenvector of LLT) by a = LTh. Figure 7.2 illustrates how authority and hub rankings can be generated from the simple 5-node web graph from Figure 7.1. As there are equal scores (identical vector elements) in the final authority (a) and hub (h) vectors, a tie-breaking strategy [49] must be applied to produce final rankings. In this example, ties are broken according to position (index) in vector. The HITS algorithm suggests that node (webpage) 3 is a clear authority in the graph A/", while nodes 1 and 2 are suitable hubs. This is not too surprising, as node 3 clearly has more inlinks (three to be exact) than any of the other nodes. The identification of a dominant hub is not so immediate, as the set nodes {1, 2,4} all have the same number of outlinks.

7,1,2

HITS Summary

The ability to rank both authorities and hubs is a clear advantage of the. HITS algorithm. Building adjacency matrices from the somewhat smaller neighborhood graphs (compared to the entire Web) and applying power

7.1. HITS Method

83

Suppose that the subset of nodes (webpages) containing a user's query terms are {1,4}. From the corresponding 5-node graph A/"(see Figure 7.1), the corresponding adjacency matrix L (see Section 7.1) is defined as /O 0 1 0 1\ 1 0 1 0 0 L= 0 1 0 1 0 . 1 0 0 0 1

\o o i o oy

The corresponding authority (LTL] and hub (LLT] matrices are /2 0 T L L= 1 0 \1

0 1 1 0 1 0 3 1 0 1 0 1

0 1\ 0 0 1 0 0 2/

/2

1 0 1 1 2 0 1 and LLT = 0 0 2 1 1 0 2 \1 1 0 0

1 1 0 0 0 I/

.

Using the power iterations

with a(°fc) and h^ defined as 5 x 1 vectors of all 1's, we obtain the following authority (a) and hub (/i) vectors:

After sorting the authority and hub scores (vector elements) in decreasing order, the following rankings are generated: Authority ranking =(2 Hub ranking = (1

4 1 5 3) and 2 5 3

4).

Figure 7.2: HITS example using the 5-node graph from Figure 7.1.

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iterations does not present a computational burden. The problem lies in the fact that the neighborhood graph must be built "on the fly"; i,e,, the authority and hub rankings are definitely query-dependent. Minor changes (or updates) to the Web could significantly change the authority and hub scores. The interdependency of the authority (a) and hub (h) vectors means that changes to one could drastically affect the other. Attempts by users to thwart the rankings by augmenting the link patterns of the Web and subsequent neighborhood graph (N") are possible. Modifications to the HITS algorithm to address such problems have been studied [14] . As mentioned in [49, 14], HITS can suffer from topic drift in that the neighborhood graph M could contain nodes (webpages) which have high authority scores for a topic unrelated to the original query. To counter this problem, vector models such as LSI (see Chapter 1) can be exploited to assess/measure the (semantic) relevance of a node or webpage to the original query terms.

7.2

PageRank Method

PageRank, the webpage scoring approach adopted by Google developers Brin and Page (see [20, 21]), produces rankings independent of a user's query. The importance of a webpage in this case is determined (in large part) by the number of other important webpages that are pointing to that page and the number of outlinks from those other webpages. Let us define the rank of a webpage Pi to be r(Pj), Tpl the set of all webpages which point to PJ, and |Q| the number of outlinks from an arbitrary webpage Q. Then, r(Pi) is recursively defined by

Alternatively, if we set x?3 = (rj(P\), r3(P